Do You Really Want to Insist on "The Best"

There is a myth that people always want "the best". I think the sales culture pushes this, because "the best" is usually the most costly, both in terms of dollars and personal energy.  

When I was still associated with the Military, there was a rule of thumb that 60% of the cost delivered the last 5% of performance. That's what the best costs you. The reality is that people generally want what's "good enough". Email, blogs, PHP, Visual Basic and duck tape are all examples of where "good enough" does just fine, thank you.  

I am a big fan of "good enough" for personal reasons. I am probably not "the best" lover, but fortunately I'm "good enough"...

Concerns about Emphisis on Project Management Methodologies

Paul Ritchie at Crossderry Blog has pushed me to think more clearly about the structures and guidelines in various approaches to project management.  I'm not trying to downplay PMI or any other methodology. PM is an evolving discipline. The structures and guidelines put forth by PMI, CMMi, PRINCE2, ITIL etc are important and have personally helped me immensely. 

My concern is that the structures and guidelines of PM (Project Schedules, Risk Management etc.) are the easy parts. As so often happens, people focus the most attention on making the easy and quantifiable things easier. Often what is most important are the non-quantifiable things. For lack of a better word, judgment. Warren Bennis has a beautiful description of judgment, something like: 

Judgment is like the Yeti. You can see it's footprints, but you never see the Yeti. 

Fortunately or unfortunately, PM has been linked with technology.  For large IT implementations, it's indispensable. But I'm not sure that link is beneficial to its development as a management discipline. Talk to someone in the construction industry and they will tell you a totally different story about PM. Talk to a wheelman at a restaurant. The wheelman is the person who makes sure that everyone at a table gets their dinner at the same time and at the same temperature. Talk to someone in the movie industry about making a movie, and they will all tell very different stories about what is essentially project management. Wouldn't those insights do more to further the discipline of PM then the refinement and codification of the structures and guidelines of PM? 

Fortunately or unfortunately, the people who have the most interest in furthering the discipline of PM are the people who have based their careers around training, consulting and perfection of the mechanistic elements of PM. Those are all important skills, but they are skills that downplay the art and the judgment aspects of PM. From my experience, the more I see PM structures and guidelines, the fewer footprints I see from good judgment.

A perfect example of where structure and content are perfectly merged and judgement is totally missed is provided by America’s Finest News Source (The Onion) in Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation

Photo Credit: CG

How Do You Measure Time and Why?

The greeks measured time in two ways.  Chronos, the quantitative measure of seconds, minutes, hours and days and Kairos, the separation between two moments of important opportunity or discovery.

It’s easy to measure chronos, every project schedule does that with the help of every clock.  How many hours, days, weeks months will that task take?

Kairos moments of great advancement or great breakthroughs.  It’s no more possible to plan that then it is to plan when you’ll meet someone and fall in love.

Do we measure chronos and hope for kairos? 

What Project Managers can Learn from Day Traders

A Little bit about Day Traders

In the world of financial services, day traders have existed since the first days of formalized markets.  What distinguishes a day trader is that they have to close out all their positions every night.  Meaning, they start with everything in cash in the morning and end with everything in cash at night.

So, if I’m a day trader and I start with $1,000,000 in the morning and after I close out all my positions I have $1,200,000, I made 20% on the day.  If this happened, I would be an extraordinarily happy person.

A day trader will make thousands of trades in the course of a day.  They watch what’s happening on the market and try to get a sense of the direction it is going in, and with this sense stay one step ahead of the market.

If they see a gap between the price someone wants to buy a stock at and the price someone else wants to sell a stock at, the day trader will try and fill that gap and make their profit in the process.  It is a very fast moving world where one succeeds figuring out what’s happening before other people do.  If you get it right, you can make a lot of money.  If you get it wrong, you lose a lot of money.  And every day, at the close of the day, you know the score.

What Project Managers can Learn from Day Traders

Project Managers try and makes sense of what is happening on a project.  They understand where the project is supposed to go, they try and understand where the project is going, and they try to fill the gap so the project goes in the right direction.

Things to think about:

• If you had to close your position every day, how would it look?
• If you resolved everything you did in the course of a day into one metric, like a day trader does money, what would that metric be?
• Would you want everyone on the project and at the company to know that metric?
• How would that change what you do?

Inquiring minds want to know…

Henry Ford would tell you, Methodologies (PMI, Agile, PRINCE2, etc.), like History, are Bunk

Dr. Martin Luther King used to end speechs by quoting a prayer from an old slave preacher.  It’s an apt description of approaches to projects today: “Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”

On July 15 2008, PMI presented the finding of their four year, $3M study looking to see if project management added value. You can see their presentation here: PMI Presentation.  What did they find?  Dr. Janice Thomas and Mr Mark Mullaly found what most of us know; PM is messy, painful and immature, but what are the alternatives?

PMI, Agile and PRINCE2 all try and provide methodologies or frameworks to increase the chances of project success.  This is difficult as projects often pull people from different departments together to work on a project. While that is what the project requires to be successful, what does that mean for the people pulled from the different departments? Is the project of primary importance to them or is what’s happening in their department of primary importance?

Business in Silos
When the modern corporation was formed, different departments were organized around specific functions. Accounting, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Operations and even IT all had separate requirements, required different skills and had different, recognizable purposes. These departments offered structure, communications channels and common ground which was the basis for working.

Large projects rarely fit in any of those silos.  People are drawn from across the organization, often temporarily, to work on that one project. Where is the common ground or structure?  Where does their loyalty lay?  Can any externally supplied methodology or framework replace corporate power, communication and funding structures?

What is Project Management?
According to the PMBOK guide, “Project Management is accomplished through the application and integration of the project management processes of initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling and closing.”

Whether constructing a building, making dinner or developing software; there are processes that will help one be more successful. At its core, that is project management.

Different Industries are Different
Is the process for constructing a building the same as the process for making dinner? Is it even similar to the process for developing software? No, the processes must be different. Are the skill sets required to succeed at each step similar? No, safety concerns in construction are obviously different from cleanliness concerns in cooking or complier concerns in software.

Can the Processes in One Make you Better in Another?
The roots of project management probably come from construction. The Romans realized foundations were needed before building walls and roofs. Specialized skills and the coordination between them are as appearant in the Roman Coliseum as in a modern sky scrappers.

At a very generic level, the ideas of critical paths, deadlines and dependencies may cross industries, but do the specialized skills to be successful in each area align? No. Safety concerns in construction are paramount. Cranes falling in Houston are catastrophic to that project, but not a concern to someone running a restaurant. Cleanliness hopefully is an overriding concern to the restaurant owner, but unfortunately isn’t so critical to software developers.

What is Project Management?
According to the PMBOK guide, “Project Management is accomplished through the application and integration of the project management processes of initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling and closing.”

Whether constructing a building, making dinner or developing software; there are processes that will help one be more successful. At its core, that is project management.

Different Industries are Different
Is the process for constructing a building the same as the process for making dinner? Is it even similar to the process for developing software? No, the processes must be different. Are the skill sets required to succeed at each step similar? No, safety concerns in construction are obviously different from cleanliness concerns in cooking or compiler concerns in software.

Can the Processes in One Make you Better in Another?
The roots of project management probably come from construction. The Romans realized foundations were needed before building walls and roofs. Specialized skills and the coordination between them are as appearant in the Roman Coliseum as in a modern sky scrappers.

At a very generic level, the ideas of critical paths, deadlines and dependencies may cross industries, but do the specialized skills to be successful in each area align? No. Safety concerns in construction are paramount. Cranes falling in Houston are catastrophic to that project, but not a concern to someone running a restaurant. Cleanliness hopefully is an overriding concern to the restaurant owner, but unfortunately isn’t so critical to software developers.

Are the Methodologies Bunk?

History is bunk.  What difference does it make how many times the ancient Greeks flew their kites? — Henry Ford (Source: NYT, October 28 1921, p. 1)
The methodologies can be a starting point, but too often its easier to focus on the methodological steps rather than thinking long and hard about what is happening on the project and the future.

• What is the business environment your company is working in?
• How is that environment changing?
• What is happening inside the business?
• What is the state of the project?
• Where does it need to go?
• What needs to happen to get it there?

Maybe they are not bunk, but rather like training wheels.

Project Manager - Right Person, Wrong Title

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.        - John Maynard Keynes

We are living in times of great change.  In two years, few of us will be where we are now.  This week I will publish five posts that attempt to live up to Keynes’ advice.  Please join me and be a little wild with your words.  Today, let’s think about and vote on what our job title should be.  Based on voting and suggestions, other options may be added.  While this election may not be as captivating as the US Presidential elections, let’s make it a relevant assault on our thoughts.

Before we begin, I have a confession to make.  I’m more technical architect than project manager.  I’ve project managed because the PM was “asked to leave” and being the architect, political expediency dictated that I fill both rolls.  If my view is jaded, it’s because I am.  I also have the scars to prove I’m not unfeeling.

Experience teaches that we should beware of fancy titles.  They often forewarn of responsibility without the power to execute.  ‘Project Manager’ and its grandiose cousin ‘Program Manager’ are both wonderful titles, but do they accurately represent the job?

Please consider the following and vote:
Project Journalist
In an ideal world, the senior person responsible for suggesting the project and getting the budget should have their future with the company tightly linked to the success or failure of the project.  If the project succeeds, they should get bonuses and recognition.  If it fails, they should forfeit this year’s bonus, return the previous year’s bonus and lose 10% of their salary to recompense the company for some of the project costs.

The project sponsor would need someone who could give them an accurate picture of what is happening on the project.  Where schedules are, who’s confident, who’s nervous, where are things going well, where there are problems and maybe even well thought out ways to improve.  A project journalist: someone who is savvy, interested in seeing the project succeed and capable of providing an unbiased account of what’s happening and why.

Project Scapegoat
Honesty is the best policy.

Project Enzyme
Enzymes are biological catalysts, or chemicals that speed up the rate of reaction between substances without themselves being consumed in the reaction. (Source)
This would be the perfect title if it didn’t have the worst abbreviation – PE.  Consider the following:
•    “Oh god, you’re the PEe on my parade.”
•    “Oh look, it’s the PEon.”
•    “Don’t look now, but here comes the PEze Corp.”
•    “Honey, I got promoted!  I’m a PE!… Why are you looking at me that way…Where are you going…”

Project Manager
Voting is strictly anonymous, so no one will know the troglodytes who vote for this title.

Other
If you have other suggestions, please make them comments section.  Meaningful additions will be added as options. Think of this election as being like Illinois politics- vote early, vote often, VOTE HERE.  You don’t even have to pay…

What should you look for in a project?

Many projects fail and many projects are going to be dropped.  Many of us will be handed projects we have to manage, good bad or otherwise, others will scramble to find work, so this question maybe pointless.  But it's not a pointless question, I think it's the most important question to ask.

Three elements determine a projects success more than anything else:

1. What is the project going to do?
   
2. Why is the project doing it?
   
3. How will the project be done?
   

PMI and Agile and other approaches dwell on the "how" element of project management.  This area is important, the devil is in the details.  However, I believe the other two elements: 'what is being done' and 'why is it being done', will tell you more about a projects chances of success than 'how it's being done'.

What are we trying to do?  

Is the project going to increase sales?  Is it going to improve productivity?  Is there enough real value in the outcome to justify the costs and keep people focused when the environment changes.

If you're wondering about this, think of it this way: If our company's stock price (or sales) fall by over 50%, is what we're doing compelling enough to continue the project?  If the answer is anything other than an unambigious "yes", think long and hard about whether you really want to devote large parts of your life and energy to a fantasy.  

My old boss drilled into my head that the difference between hallucination and vision is whether its worth the effort. [Editor: Funny, your dates give that reason for dumping you.]

Why is the project being done?  

If it's some managers pet project, even if that manager is the CEO, the chances of it's successful completion drop dramatically.  If the devil is in the details, god is in the "why".  If the "why" is compelling enough, almost any project will find a way to succeed.

There are two really compelling whys:

1. The project will increase sales.
2. The project will decrease costs.

If one or both of those goals are intuitive, obvious and achievable, the projects chances of success are excellent.

I'm all infavor of understanding the "how", but if you can pick which projects you work on, think about the "what" and they "why" too.

Understanding the world and aligning your expectations

I'm sure you've talked about what's happening on Wall St.  Very few firms will be spared and if you work in project management, it's very unlikely you'll avoid all the problems.  As this chart from Sequoia Capital's presentation show, tech spending is heavily influenced by S&P 500 Earnings.

I've been doing a lot of work and I'm very excited that next week I'll be doing a series of posts for Silicon Valley Project Management on what the credit crisis means for people working in project management and in companies in general.

The outline is:

1. The Credit Crisis: What Does it Mean for Your Business - This will look at what's currently happening and what it might mean for your firm.
2. The Credit Crisis: Why It Is Important - A Little History - To try and get some context, we'll look at a little history of why firms were set up and why investors, like Carl Icahn are so outraged.
3. The Credit Crisis: For Project Managers - What Does It Mean? - What are some things as project managers you should be doing.
4. The Credit Crisis: For Project Managers - What should you Expect? - What are things to look for and think about.

I will be republishing it here a day after it publishes on SVProjectManagement.  Predictions are difficult, especially about the future.  I'd love to know your thoughts.

Andy

Is it the Environment or the Actions which Make You Successful?

If you want something to be successful, do you create the environment or pull the trigger? If you are going to have a successful project, the correct environment needs to be created. Pulling the trigger is nice and that is what people will notice, but success depends upon preparation. That preparation is rarely noticed. The most aggressive actions in the wrong environment end up looking silly.

Think about it this way, do forest fires occur when someone carelessly throws away a match? Well maybe. If you throw away a lit match in a green forest with rain falling all around you, it's very unlikely a forest fire will result. If it is in the middle of a heat wave with the grass burnt brown and hot Santa Ana winds blowing at night, a roaring forest fire may result. What is critical is the environmental conditions in which the match was thrown.

It's the old line about the straw that broke the camels back. Straw is essentially weightless, but under the right conditions, it can wreck havoc. Maybe those conditions are an overloaded camel or some other environmental situation.

If you want tremendous results, look at the environment, the necessary preparation to succeed within that environment, get the preparations underway and then at the right time, pull the trigger.

Have You Prepared Yourself for the Opportunity to be Lucky?

Someone once said that luck is the intersection between preparation and opportunity. If you prepare yourself and hit on the right opportunity, you have made yourself lucky. Congratulations, you are participating in a good life. You should be happy and your friends should be happy for you.

If you want to create something, doesn't it take more than luck? You need an idea for what you want to create. You need a plan and to know what the plan will require and whether it's feasible.

If you have a feasible plan, you need to find the missing pieces. When you find the people with the correct preparation to complete your plan; you need to articulate it in such a way that, it is in their best interest to make your plan succeed. They need to see your plan as their opportunity to make themselves lucky.

If the plan requires capital or assistance to be successful, then everyone needs to see how it benefits them to have your plan succeed. They all need to provide input to fill in the missing pieces so the plan has the best chance of success.

Finally, you must have enough time. It takes time to come up with an idea, make it feasible, find the right participants, get meaningful assistance, refine the plan and then execute it successfully. All of these things are important, but they all start with you. Have you prepared yourself for the opportunity to be lucky?

Photo Credit: Eric Lafforgue

What Makes a Project Succeed? The Project or the Management?

What is it that makes a project succeed? Is it the methodologies, the risk analysis, the reporting, the communications ability and talents of the managers or is it the project? This question came up as a result of a discussion about a story that Richard Feynman told, explaining what he called Cargo Cult Science. The story goes as follows:

In the South Seas, there is a cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas - he's the controller - and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

How many project are really important or are there times we're waiting for planes to land?

Photo Credit: escapista

Poker and Project Management

These two are at the opposite end of the spectrum. PM is about planning, critical paths and resource allocation. It is logical, analytical and linear. Poker is about intuition, betting big when opportunity’s ripe, reading situations and constantly readjusting.

Knowing how to do both is critical. Poker shows you a lot about someone. How they manage their emotions, act when the cards fall their way, act when they’re back is up against a wall. In PM parlance, how they manage risk and success.

More importantly, you see how people react under pressure, inside and outside their circles of competence. Intuition benefits you within your circle of competence. In friendly games, dealing and calling the game circulates. You can’t always play your game, but you can pick which games, which situations and how much you bet.

If you really only know five-card stud, you’re best off betting conservatively in Omaha or Pirate’s Booty, but then going big when the situation is right in five-card stud. Sticking with what you know gives your intuition its edge.

You’ll never win if you don’t play, but you won’t win consistently if you don’t play smart. Poker compresses all of life’s lessons into a brief, pressure packed situation. Is there a better way to learn about people?

How many PMs play poker with the team? Isn’t that what you’re doing on a project?

Photo credit: Wiseacre_Photo

Should You Manage People or the Environment?

Fish do not notice the water in which they swim.

Every company has a culture. There are myths and stories that are told which reflect the company culture. Its hard to define, its difficult to see and it affects every decision, project and action a company takes.

Is it easier for a fish to swim with the current or against it? Does the pounding rain, rocking waves and conflicting currents lead to curious and creative fish or small, protectionist and defensive fish?

Should you try and manage the fish or will you do better managing the environment?


Photo Credit: Olive Eyel

Aligning People or Letting them Align Part IV

Bill Miller and I have been talking about whether it is better to align people or let them align. You can read the other three parts here, here and here. Its been a great discussion, to make it clearer, I'd like to reframe my response. I always hate it when girlfriends do this to me, so I'm apologizing up front. [Editor: No need to apologize, I've been suggesting girls do that to you for years and it's benefited me tremendously.]

A little background on business
To get some insight to this, let's think about why businesses were really founded. The modern corporation came into being in Britain in the early seventeenth century, when some very intelligent and presumably humble nobleman noticed that there’s no correlation between intelligence and wealth. In fact, there may even be an inverse correlation, but I’ll resist the urge to rant about Paris Hilton and spare you my other Hilton-esque urges. [Editor: Please do.]

What these noblemen realized was that if they gave up a portion of their capital and entrusted it to an organized group of intelligent, motivated and hungry workers selected from the masses, they could make themselves much wealthier. A side benefit to this was the incredible improvement in the standard of living for those working for them. This is the genesis of the modern corporation.

Why is this important? What these noblemen and now women realized was that they had to set up the appropriate structures so the intelligent, motivated and hungry workers had proper direction and incentives to make the business successful and them wealthier.

Project Structures
Should teams self-organize? Absolutely. As a project goes along, the team needs the freedom to realign itself to meet the demands of the project. What an effective manager does is define the structures within which to project will operate to deliver what the business needs. If the project team has the correct direction and incentives, they will align themselves and the project has a better chance of success.

Does this make sense?

Photo Credit: Eric Lafforgue

Aligning People or Letting them Align Part III

Bill Miller, confound him, asked an excellent question. Normally I avoid people asking excellent questions, but as he paid me the compliment of commenting on what I wrote, [Editor: and I made sound intelligent] I felt obligated to respond. And it is an excellent question.

What is the essence of self organization as opposed to their being organized?
The crucial question is responsibility. If a group organizes itself, the group is responsible for the outcome. If someone else organizes the group, the organizer is responsible the outcome.

If ten kids get together to play basketball, then they choose teams, call plays and evaluate the results. If a coach organizes a team, schedules the practices and calls the plays, then the coach is responsible.

Accepting Responsibility Versus Diffusing It
If three people get together and start a company to implement a new idea for running projects, they are responsible for developing the products, the methodologies and finding the customers. If their products and services work, customers continue working with them and the company grows. If their approach doesn't work, the company goes out of business. Those three people and the others who join them are responsible. (This is how CAP was born)

If a company decides that it wants to implement a new program, it picks three people and tells them to implement it. The first thing those people do (if their smart) is ask for more money, more people and more time. In this situation, it is in the three peoples' best interest to make the program as large, as expensive and as time consuming as possible. If they are smart, they diffuse responsibility, but accept credit.

What Advantage do Entrepreneurs Have?
An entrepreneur and the people starting a company take responsibility for making it succeed. People taking a job are responsible to do what someone else organized for them to do.

Are both important? Absolutely.
Which one is likely to effectively produce defined products and services?
Which one is likely to produce innovative products and services?
Which one are you looking for?

Aligning People or Letting them Align Part II

Bill Miller made an interesting suggestion about self organizing teams. As kids playing baseball, the first decision was often who would be the two team captains. Those captains then picked the teams. Sometimes they were the two best players or more often the two players most able to help their team win. As kids, we knew what was important to win.

An interesting circle of dependencies. The kids picked the captains and the captains picked the teams. Almost an implicit contract. The group gave the captain the right to organize the team, but if the team didn't win, but they had to win to be captain in the future.

Captains changed. Sometimes one person was a captain for one sport, but not for another. Sometimes frustration over past performances lead to minor mutinies. [Editor: That will be fine, thank you.] Sometimes new leaders emerged as time went on. What's important is that the process was self regulating. If the captain helped the team win, they continued as captain.

Can Business be Self Regulating?
There are obviously differences between ten year olds playing baseball and business, though I suspect there are not as many as one might hope. How different would it be if the workers picked the manager? If the people working on a project were responsible for identifying the person most likely to make the project succeed, who would they pick? And why?

Often times in business executives picks a manager or team lead and then charge that person with assembling a team. What if the team were selected first and that teams first responsibility was to pick the team lead?

Have you heard of people taking this approach? How did it work out?

Do You Align People or Let Them Align?

People are inherently self organizing. Who did you make friends with when you were a kid on the block? When you went to school, there were many kids in school, but there were a couple who became your friends. Why?

Are you organizing your teams so the become more efficient and effective, like the swimmer on the US relay team? Or are you hampering the very creativity needed for great advancement? Not sure? Think about how insurance or stock exchanges came about.

Why is it Called a Stock Exchange?
In 1680 Jonathan Mills opened a coffee house on Exchange Alley in London. It started attracting like-minded individual who would buy and sell stocks and commodities. By 1698, John Castaing had started posting prices. Taking the street name, Exchanges were born.

A Second Example, Lloyd's
Likewise, around 1688 Edward Lloyd opened his coffeehouse, Lloyd's. It attracted merchants and ship owners. By 1692 it moved to Lombard St and was later incorporated as a society, and insurance was born.

Why Organize the Self Organizing?
If kids can organize a football game all on their own, why inflict organization? Because organized teams beat sandlot teams. Companies are organized to clarify roles and responsibilities. Accounting and Finance are different from sales. Likewise project teams are organized to ensure the right people are in the right roles with the right responsibilities. [Editor: Can't my responsibility be to roll you under?]

In your company and projects', are you organizing to amplify peoples' abilities so the team succeeds and wins the gold?

What do you Pay Attention to? VED Analysis

If a surplus of information leads to a deficit of attention, how do you decide what to pay attention to? In the world of projects and corporate communications, consider using the benefits of VED Analysis to separate what is Vital from what is Essential from what is Desirable.

VED Analysis
VED analysis comes from the world of evaluating what medicines are stocked, especially where trade-off have to be made and lives are at stake. It is a system of setting priorities and drugs are classified according to their health impact.

In the world of projects, where there are limited resources and steering committees or project leadership teams need to evaluate alternate approaches, what about using VED Analysis to classify options by considering what their outcomes would be? If the suggestion out lead to an outcome that is vital, how should that be compared to an outcome that is essential or desirable?

Would changing your analysis simplify the evaluation process?

Photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik

How do You Engage People?

Gartner analyst Adam Sarner released a report and and published a Forbes article on what this means for marketers and businesses trying to engage customers. Jeremiah Owyang also had very insightful comments about engaging people in online communities.

If you are going to use Online Communities to improve your corporate productivity, its important to understand the ideas because some of the challenges are a little different as are some of the opportunities.

Gartner's The Four Levels of Engagement:

• Up to 3 percent of individuals will be creators, providing original content and can be advocates that promote your product and services.
  
• Between 3 percent and 10 percent of individuals will be contributors, essentially followers, who add to the conversation, but don't initiate it. They can recommend products and services as customers move through a buying process, looking for purchasing advice.
  
• Between 10 percent and 20 percent of individuals will be opportunists, who can further contributions regarding purchasing decisions. Opportunists can "add value" to a conversation that's taking place, while walking through a considered purchase.
  
• Approximately 80 percent of individuals will be lurkers (and all users start as such), essentially spectators, who reap the rewards of online community input, but only absorb what is being communicated. However, they can implicitly contribute and validate indirectly reporting the value from the rest of the community.

The Challenges
The biggest challenge is the number of people participating on internal online communities. If you have a potential customer community of tens-, hundreds of thousand or millions of customers, having 3% creators, 3 to 10% contributors, 10 to 20% opportunists is probably survivable. The large numbers of potentials mean that you'll get enough members contributing to make a difference.

If you have a team of 50 people who are distributed around the world and you want them to participate, 3% participation is pretty scary. [Editor: actually, it's your participation that's pretty scary.]

The Opportunity
The opportunity really lays in creating a way for the lurkers to participate. Prediction markets, polls, questions and answers must be aligned in ways that get meaningful input from a broader group without requiring large investments of time.

The goal of two to three minutes a week should be the first step in engaging lurkers. You must track when they have engaged and acknowledge it. The immediate recognition of a lurkers new engagement will be key to engaging them further. Their engagement must be meaningful and productive if companies are going to derive value from online communities.

People participate and engage in a community because they feel recognized and that they are a part of something larger than themselves. For businesses this offers a great advantage. Projects engage people in the business and intelligent use of online communities increase focus and productivity.

Photo credit: jeremiah_owyang

Scope: Less is More

Craig Brown and Kevin and Julian are having an intelligent and thoughtful discussion on product vs project scope. Never one to keep an opinion to myself, I couldn't help but offer my own. I have an opinion on everything, which is not necessarily beneficial. An ex-girlfriend claimed she dumped me because I'd argue with her about whether dirt is brown... [Editor: There were other reasons she dumped you, we decided that one hurt your ego the least.]

Scope
Scope is one of the great issues with corporate projects and one of the advantages a start-up has. I don't think the problem is a product or project perspective, but rather a WIMBY perspective.

Many people are familiar with George Carlin's NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard), but fewer are familiar with WIMBY (Wanted In My Back Yard).

In corporations, often times projects get funded because different executives/managers can get things they want included in the scope. The project is sold by inclusion, be it to the product or project scope. In either case, because funding can be expanded to meet additional requirements, which need to be added to get buy-in from key executives/managers, the project or product get too big. They suffer from WIMBY

Start-up Advantage
An entrepreneur can only build what they can pay for. I didn't recognize this benefit until I realized one of the advantage a start-up has is limited resources. I can't get more funding without selling what I already have and then doing what the customer wants. Because I have to pay for additions out of sales, my own pocket or consulting arrangements, what we develop has to be simple and clearly present the value we are offering.

Less is more.
[Editor: Your ex doesn't think so...]

Photo credit: Mingfong